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May042011

Midnight in the Arrivals Terminal

Friday afternoon, I got a phone call from the wife of my old friend Keith — now living on the east coast — who had to fly into Salt Lake on very short notice to attend to some important family business. She wondered if he could impose on me to pick him up from the airport? Sure, I said, no problem. She apologized that it was so last-minute, and that Keith’s plane was arriving so late. Again, I said, no problem… I tend to be a night owl anyway, and I actually like going to the airport. It lets me people watch and fantasize about going somewhere myself.

Well, his plane got delayed — he texted me from Chicago, with another apology, to which I replied with another “no problem” — so by the time he finally arrived in SLC, it was very late indeed. Just in case you’ve never been in an airport past 10 PM, let me tell you… things get kinda weird. People tend to let their hair down a bit more than they might when broad daylight is streaming through the skylights above.

Continue Reading…

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May032011

100 Things I Love About the Movies

I noticed this semi-meme list thingie over at Michael May’s Adventure Blog the other day and thought it looked like something I ought to do. There are no rules, really; it’s just an exercise in free association that asks you to name 100 things you love about movies. I interpreted that as things that made me fall in love with movies, or that rekindle my love for them when I see them again. Anyhow, it’s a list of movie-related stuff I like… how could I resist that?

Continue Reading…

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May022011

And in Other News…

NASA says it will be at least May 10 before they make another attempt to launch Endeavour. The engineers have decided to replace something called a Load Control Assembly (LCA), which I understand is similar to  a circuit-breaker box. The faulty LCA is believed to have been causing the problem with the heaters on the Auxiliary Power Unit, which led to the scrubbing of last week’s launch attempt, and it will take some time to swap it out and retest everything it connects to.

It’s funny… even knowing that this will be Endeavour‘s last flight, I’m still as impatient with these delays as I was when I was a kid. Once those birds get out to the launch pad, I want to see them fly… irrational, isn’t it? Considering that a successful launch only means we’re that much closer to the end of the shuttles forever. But I’ve never claimed to be rational when it comes to things like this.

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May022011

One More Thought on the Bin Laden Mission

It would’ve been nice, I think, if the previous administration had given more weight to the “intelligence, patience, and commandos” approach that was used yesterday to such great success, rather than going directly to “Hulk SMASH!!!!” mode and bankrupting us with full-scale wars in two separate countries. I’m just sayin’. 

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May022011

Bin Laden

So the son of a bitch is dead. Good. Now can we get the hell out of Afghanistan and stop having to take our shoes off at the airport? I know the answer to both questions is “probably not,” which for me beggars a third one: what practical good did bin Laden’s death accomplish?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m as thrilled as anyone that this particular “i” has finally been dotted. It’s been a long time coming. But after all the cheering dies down, what, if anything, has actually changed? Al Qaeda is still out there, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see them stage a bunch of retaliatory attacks, possibly even here on American soil; we’re still hemorrhaging resources into a country that’s known as a historical breaker of empires (and our empire is so very close to being broken, isn’t it?); we’re still running the anti-American gulag at Guantanamo (yes, I’ve heard some of the intelligence that got bin Laden came from Gitmo; doesn’t change the fact that the place’s very existence runs counter to all the American values I learned as a kid from Star Trek and Schoolhouse Rock); the PATRIOT Act is still in effect, making a mockery of our Fourth Amendment protection against unwarranted search and seizure; the TSA is still getting its jollies without even buying us dinner first; people still need jobs; the ice caps are still melting; we’re still running out of oil; Hollywood is still creatively bankrupt (although there’s sure to be a movie or three about today’s big story); and the Republicans are still trying to dismantle 75 years of social progress. In short, the 21st Century continues to suck. Hard.

On the other hand, bringing down the monster who is directly responsible for steering our nation into the Bizarro-world dimension we’ve inhabited for the past 10 years has had an undeniably positive effect on the country’s psyche. I noticed on my way into work this morning that a lot of people are walking with a renewed spring in their step, and the prevailing mood seems to be, if not actually happy, than incrementally less miserable than it’s been in a very long time. I find myself thinking of Doolittle’s Tokyo raid that accomplished very little tactically speaking, but was a huge morale booster in the dark months after Pearl Harbor. Bin Laden’s execution is perhaps the same sort of event… it didn’t really change a damn thing, as I’ve noted, but everybody’s feeling better because of it. And I must confess, that includes myself.

Of course, it could just be that the days are finally starting to warm up, and the tulips in the downtown sidewalk planter boxes are looking lovely… that always makes me feel a little happier…

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Apr292011

Scrubbed!

Space Shuttle Endeavour STS-134 (201104290002HQ)

Today’s scheduled launch of space shuttle Endeavour has been pushed back at least 72 hours due to a problem with one the orbiter’s auxiliary power units, or APUs in NASA-speak (which, for the record, doesn’t annoy me nearly as much as the bizspeak). The fuel lines that feed the APUs have to be heated to prevent them from freezing up in space and leaving the shuttle without full hydraulic power for flight control surfaces and the landing gear upon re-entry. Apparently a thermostat on one of those heaters has gone bad, making the unit unreliable. Technicians are now draining the 535,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen from the external fuel tank, so they can work safely in and around the orbiter’s rear section. The astronauts never even made it aboard their ship before the cancellation; they were in their Astrovan, en route to the pad, when the news came down. I imagine they must be tremendously disappointed. Launch delays are an occupational hazard for astronauts, of course, but I know if I were in their position, I’d have been up all night, totally wired and rarin’ to go, and then to have the adventure snatched away when you’re so close, within moments of boarding and only hours of actually going… well, I personally would be crushed. Guess I don’t have the right stuff.

Anyhow, I wonder if the problem has anything to do with the lightning storm last night. Perhaps there was some damage done after all? (Incidentally, that gorgeous photo above was taken after the storm; the shuttle is reflecting in a really big puddle of rainwater…)

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Apr282011

So, What’s Going on at Kennedy Space Center?

This was the spectacular scene at Launch Pad 39A earlier this evening:

Space Shuttle Endeavour STS-134 (201104280022HQ)

According to various Twitter feeds and such, Endeavour was unharmed by the lightning storm; I guess Mother Nature was just giving her a big sendoff for her final voyage. Now the Rotating Service Structure, the big clamshell gantry that encloses the shuttles while they sit on the pad, has been retracted and, as of this writing, everything is on track for a scheduled liftoff tomorrow afternoon at 3:47 EST.

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Apr282011

A Marker for Julie

A couple streets over from my office, near the southeast corner of a city block that’s come to be known in recent years as Library Square, there stands a small, makeshift memorial. You know the sort of thing I’m talking about, a pair of wood scraps fastened together to form a cross, then draped in flowers and colorful plastic beads. Crosses like this are all over the place if you pay attention, alongside streets and roads and highways, marking places where somebody’s loved one met their destiny while behind the wheel of a car, and often at the hands of another driver. The one at Library Square is at the spot where my coworker Julie Ann Jorgenson’s car came to rest after it was slammed from behind by a speeding truck a few months ago.

I didn’t know this marker was there until just a couple days ago. My father drove past it at some point and asked me if it could be related to my “friend from work.” He didn’t finish the rest of that thought, “the one who got killed.” He didn’t have to. I knew immediately who he meant, and figured that yes, the marker was probably for her.

Yesterday afternoon, I took a little stroll during my free time. I didn’t plan on going to Library Square, but somehow that’s where I ended up, kneeling before this tiny structure underneath a gorgeous blue sky. I gently rubbed the petal of a bloom as I read Julie’s name, painted in light blue letters along the cross-bar. I don’t know what I expected to feel… a resurgence of the surprisingly intense grief I experienced when I first heard the news, or a sense of relief, or maybe some sense of Julie herself, a lingering whiff of her spirit… something. But the truth is, I didn’t really feel anything. I wondered who had placed the marker here, and how long the city will allow it to remain. I took a guess at who is changing out the wilted flowers for fresh ones. And I shook my head for the hundredth time at the vast, stupid, cosmic waste. But I didn’t feel anything. It bothers me.

In a related note, I had a Google alert waiting when I got home last night, notifying me that Julie’s killer, Shane Roy Gillette, is scheduled for a hearing to determine his mental competency. So this is going to be his defense? Incompetency? He was pretty damn incompetent the morning he killed a vibrant young woman, wasn’t he?

And so it goes, as Vonnegut wisely observed…

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Apr272011

An Idea Born in Unsettled Times

With space shuttle Endeavour, the youngest of the fleet, scheduled to blast off on its final mission Friday afternoon, this seems an appropriate time to post the following, a NASA-produced video overview of the shuttle program narrated by none other than Captain James T. Kirk himself. Blow this one up to full-screen size… there’re some great clips here, including a time lapse of the crawler carrying Endeavour out to the launch pad, archival footage of the lifting bodies that were tested early in the shuttle’s design phase (think of the opening from The Six Million Dollar Man), and film of the mid-70s glide and landing tests using the prototype shuttle Enterprise.

It looks to me like this might be part of a longer documentary, considering it only touches the surface of the shuttle program, completely ignoring the Challenger and Columbia disasters and equally failing to mention the many, many achievements such as the Hubble Space Telescope, the ISS, and the Buck Rogers-style untethered spacewalks using the Manned Maneuvering Unit. If this does turn out to be a preview of a full-length doc, put me down for a DVD copy…

Incidentally, I found it interesting that Enterprise was originally supposed to be called the Constitution, considering that Star Trek‘s fictional Enterprise is — are you ready for this? — a Constitution-class starship. And yes, I know exactly what a tremendous nerd I am, thank you for mentioning it…

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